To showcase his collections for women and the home, Ralph Lauren builds a Beaux Arts mansion from scratch on Manhattan’s Upper East Side

Dreaming impossible dreams and making them come true is something of a Ralph Lauren hallmark. Back in the 1970s, for instance, when the fashion grandee was a young father of three pushing a stroller on New York City’s Upper East Side, Lauren often gazed upon the Renaissance Revival château that heiress Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo built for herself in 1898, on Madison Avenue at 72nd Street, and imagined the largely unused house aglow with light and filled with people. And that’s precisely what happened after Lauren made it his American flagship in 1986, following a three-year restoration that, he says, “made it more beautiful than it ever was.”

A few years ago, Lauren was turning two historic houses in Paris into stores when he had another flight of fancy. Why not tear down the unprepossessing building opposite the Waldo house (commonly called the Rhinelander Mansion), where his sportswear shop stood, and put in its place a sparklingly pretty version of an hôtel particulier? It would have high-ceilinged rooms dedicated to his women’s and home collections, while the château would be given over to menswear.

For this venture Lauren decided on the Beaux Arts style, a boldly classical architectural movement of a century ago. Though some neighborhood naysayers questioned the wisdom of a structure that looks back in time rather than forward—ersatz was a word bandied about by some critics—the designer and his team took comfort in stately cornices and shapely windows, and believed the public would too.

“That’s always been my philosophy: timelessness, not trends,” Lauren says. In his opinion, cutting-edge buildings date quickly and offer no spiritual satisfaction. “I like materials that get better with age, like leather, marble, and exotic woods,” he continues. “They provide a sense of value.” Embracing a style that was last fashionable in the 1920s made sense to Lauren’s architect as well. “Some of New York’s most beautiful Beaux Arts buildings are just a few blocks away, like the mansions built by James B. Duke and Henry Clay Frick,” says Michael Gilmore, a partner in Weddle Gilmore Architects of Scottsdale, Arizona, and a longtime Lauren associate. “We decided to live up to that tradition of Upper East Side houses being highly informed by French design.” The project also presented an opportunity to retrieve the corner lot’s long-lost grandeur: From 1894 until 1951, when it was razed, a Federal Revival brick townhouse by Gilded Age tastemaker Stanford White occupied the site.

The 22,000-square-foot building that emerged from Gilmore’s collaboration with the Polo Ralph Lauren Creative Services team, headed by executive vice president Alfredo Paredes, is a four-story urban palace that would be comfortable fronting a shady boulevard in Chicago, Buenos Aires, or even Shanghai, to name just three cities where the Beaux Arts style blossomed. “New York City, in all its complexity, is the kind of place that can get away with a gesture like this,” says Paul Gunther, president of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America. He notes that Gilmore’s design, which incorporates a balustraded terrace on the second floor, thoughtfully echoes details of a 1916 apartment house that stands nearby. “I believe it’s a noble structure that ultimately will surrender itself to the context of the neighborhood as time goes by,” Gunther adds—especially when the crisp, clean façade takes on the patina of age.

For now, however, immaculate blocks of Indiana limestone rise from the pavement in exquisitely mortared layers that bear witness to the craftsmen, both American and European, who worked on the project for more than two years. Parts of the façade were carved by hand, and the lacy black ironwork made for the doors, window railings, and interior staircase was also shaped in time-honored fashion—with fire, hammers, and tongs.

Inside, the new store has the atmosphere of an aristocrat’s august retreat transformed into a chic shopping arcade. Paved with Turkish marble, the entrance hall glitters with illuminated display cases and jewel-box vitrines accented with polished steel. One elegant salon, paneled with golden lattice, contains the world’s first Ralph Lauren Fine Jewelry boutique. Where the Rhinelander Mansion’s gleaming mahogany staircase is thickly carpeted and laden with oil portraits of Victorian and Edwardian gentlemen, the steps of its new marble counterpart are bare, the stairwell highlighted with beveled mirrors and hung with sketches and black-and-white photographs of women. The silver-framed images are part of a storewide collection that ranges from a 19th-century depiction of Winston Churchill’s mother, the ravishing New York debutante Jennie Jerome, to a 1970s Victor Skrebneski portrait of Diana Ross at her sleekest.

That glamorous century-spanning sorority, coupled with dressing rooms sheathed in fanciful chinoiserie wallpaper and ceilings sequined with light cast by crystal chandeliers, emphasizes how Ralph Lauren’s latest outpost is the alluring yin to its neighbor’s broad-shouldered yang. The Continental sophistication the new store presents to passersby “just gives you a lift,” Lauren says. “Which thrills me, because it is the fulfillment of what I do: creating timeless beauty that’s universal.”